Knowledge is safety at sea
Open almost any accident report and you will find a section on communication. A seafarer who understands and is understood is a safer seafarer. That is why this site exists.
Who makes this
Łukasz J. Skrzypczak
Master Mariner, crew management, author of every question on this site
- 19 years at sea
- Deck boy to Chief Officer
- Master Mariner licence
- Crewing since 2014
I started in 1995 with a chipping hammer in my hand and salt on my face, and spent 19 years at sea: ordinary seaman, able seaman, bosun, officer, and finally Chief Officer. I hold a Master Mariner licence; I came ashore before my first command and moved to the office side of shipping. Since 2014 I have worked in crew management, placing seafarers on European vessels and reading English test results from the other side of the desk.
I have seen good sailors lose contracts over a test score, and I have seen what happens on board when the bridge and the deck do not share a language. Both problems have the same fix: practical English, taught the way ships actually use it.
How you know you can trust this
Around recruitment tests the internet is full of "answers", "reviewers" and guarantees. This site takes the other road, and you can check it.
Every question is ours
Not one question here comes from a real exam. I write them from the standards the exams are built on and check each one against the source. Copying a test bank would be illegal, and it would not teach you anything.
Sources named on every page
COLREG, SOLAS, the LSA and FSS Codes, IMO SMCP, STCW, MLC 2006: each module names the standard it follows. Facts about commercial tests come from the providers' own public pages, and every guide carries the date it was last checked.
Mistakes get fixed, with thanks
A wrong figure, a rule quoted badly, a recording that says the wrong thing: write to me and it is corrected. No ads, no tracking and no affiliation with any test provider, so nobody pays me to say anything.
The mission
SeamanEnglish promotes the seafaring profession internationally and raises the standard of maritime English, because language competence is not paperwork: it is a safety barrier, the same as a helmet or a harness. The IMO created Standard Marine Communication Phrases for exactly this reason. When your English is strong, you work safer, you sign better contracts, and you come home to your family.
How the site works
- The free English check and the guides are open to every seafarer, everywhere.
- The full practice test with audio, the listening trainer and the knowledge test are free too. There are no ads, no tracking and no selling of anyone's data; the bills are paid from my pocket and from the coffees seafarers buy me when the site has helped them.
- Everything here is original material. We never reproduce real exam questions, and we are not affiliated with any test provider.
AI tools and synthetic voices
This site is made by one person with software, and it says so. Every recording you hear, from a Mayday call to a single glossary word, is synthetic speech: an AI text-to-speech engine reads a script written for this site, using licensed voices of professional voice artists from Britain, the Philippines, India, Ukraine, Poland, China and Indonesia. The accent label tells you where the voice comes from. No real ship, port or person was recorded, nobody is imitated, and every vessel, call sign and name in the scenarios is fictional. Without synthetic voices, hundreds of recordings in seven accents would not exist on a free site.
The site is built by one person with the help of AI tools, from the first draft of a question to the code of the trainer. The facts rest on the public standards credited on each page: SOLAS, COLREG, STCW, MARPOL, MLC 2006, the IMO SMCP and the USCG Navigation Rules. Nothing is copied from any commercial test. If you find a mistake, the contact form reaches the author directly, and corrections go live within days. Synthetic audio is labelled as synthetic wherever it plays.
Photos in the banners: merchant ships and seafarers from public domain and CC0 collections on Wikimedia Commons (Alf van Beem’s port photographs, the Dutch National Archives, Military Sealift Command civil service mariners), cropped and tinted to the site’s colours; the full list with links is in the site repository (docs/zrodla-banery.md). Nobody pictured is connected with this site.
Contact
The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn. I read everything, especially messages from seafarers about what they need next.
Support
If a test here helped you sign a contract, the best thanks is a line left after the test for the next seafarer, or ☕ a coffee (more ways to help on the support page). Both are optional, and nothing on this site will ever be hidden behind either.